The 2025 Sundance Film Festival is still going on, and will continue through February 2. However, at this point all the major titles have premiered, and the at-home part of the festival has kicked in, so it seems fair to say that it was a fairly dispiriting edition, especially for those who judge Sundance as an indication of the state of the union for indie movies. Although some very good films were screened, there didn’t seem to be a single breakout title, one that could find a significant audience beyond arthouse fans or low-budget horror enthusiasts, or that could even make a serious awards run. Notably, as the festival entered its second week, a grand total of 2 films had been sold for general distribution, the body-horror romance Together (bought by Neon, in the hope it can build on MUBI’s hit with The Substance), and the contemplative logger story Train Dreams (an Oscar play by Netflix). For those of us on the scene, there was a more amorphous but evident lame-duck feeling in Park City, where the festival lost another once-regular venue, and the one-time 24/7 supermarket now shuts its doors at 10PM (11PM on weekends). Sundance will soon announce its new location deal that will kick in beginning in 2027, and while Utah is still one of the contenders (along with Boulder and Cincinnati), that bid emphasizes Salt Lake City over Park City. One way or another, it feels like an era is turning a new and uncertain corner.
SORRY, BABY (no distrib): For all that, Sundance at its best can still showcase new and exciting talent. Eva Victor has achieved some notice as a performer (she was one of the few members of the Billions ensemble who didn’t give way to that show’s hard-charging, scenery-chewing style of declamation), but as star, writer and director of Sorry, Baby she proves herself to be a filmmaker with a distinct and appealing voice. The story Sorry, Baby tells is not, at its root, unfamiliar: Victor plays Agnes, a grad student in English Literature at a small northeastern college, who suffers a sexual assault and spends the next several years dealing with the resulting trauma. But Victor refuses to give way to the tropes of that narrative. She plays with chronology, so that we know the post-assault Agnes before we know that she’s been assaulted. Much as Agnes herself tries to distance herself from what’s happened to her, the script nibbles at the edges of her trauma, concentrating on her close friendship with fellow student Lydie (Naomi Ackle), her awkward semi-romance with neighbor Gavin (Lucas Hedges), and the paltry internal politics of the college as Agnes moves into academia, infuriating a rival (a hilarious Kelly McCormack). Victor’s writing has the fullness of a novel, with room for scenes of serious emotion and also for what are almost self-contained skits, like a random lunch Agnes has with a sandwich store owner (John Carroll Lynch), and a disastrous day of jury duty. Victor takes Agnes very seriously, but Agnes often doesn’t take herself seriously at all, and much of the writing is bracingly funny. (Victor’s script won the festival’s Screenwriting award.) Although the visuals are graceful (Mia Cioffi Henry was the cinematographer), this is a low-budget first film that rests on its acting and writing more than its technical virtuosity. Sorry, Baby is the kind of calling card that should establish Eva Victor as an exciting arrival on the movie scene.
DEAD LOVER (no distrib): Even by Sundance standards, Grace Glowicki’s gothic-horror-sex-comedy seems to have been made on a budget that would barely fill the gas tank of an SUV. Shot entirely on soundstages, with the barest of sets and props, and “special effects” that are more nods to the idea of effects than actual ones, it’s a Frankenstein story, with Glowicki as a lonely gravedigger who can’t find love because she stinks of corpses. Finally she meets a man (played by co-writer Ben Petrie–he and Loren Morrow and Leah Doz play all the other characters) who isn’t turned off by her odor, and they have a fine raunchy time together until he dies tragically at sea. That sets the gravedigger on a mission to bring him back in some form even though all that’s survived is his finger. This eventually embroils a Count, the Count’s dead opera-singer wife, and assorted town busy-bodies, fishermen, nuns and others. Dead Lover is trying way too hard to be an instant cult movie, with performances that are pitched at the high end of hysteria, silly make-up and accents, and a reliance on giggling sexuality and oozing body parts. It feels both overthought (Look, German Expressionism!) and like something tossed-off after a single long night of edibles. At 84 minutes, it feels exhaustingly long.